May 8 , 1909-] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
739 
most care lest his shadow fall athwart the cur¬ 
rent. But he has his reward when forty feet 
away, just at the tail of the hole, a flash of 
orange and silver rises through the amber water 
from beneath a snarl of alder roots. With an 
instinctive turn of the wrist he drives home the 
little fly hook and at once feels that it is fast 
in a fish unusually heavy for these semi-civilized 
waters. After a sharp struggle the trout is 
turned from the snarl of alders—no hope if he 
once gets in there—and upstream he races, the 
angler rapidly shortening line with arm-long 
sweeps through the guides. 
At last the fish is tired and the angler gin¬ 
gerly guides him toward the bank where, after 
one or two unsuccessful attempts, the little net 
is slipped beneath him and he is lifted tenderly 
out on the meadow grass—a plump pound and 
a half of jeweled beauty. 
Before the swamp is reached three or four 
more nice fish, though much smaller, have been 
creeled. Then the angler returns to his start¬ 
ing point, gathers in his package of lunch, and 
essays the woods. Here one must wade if he 
would fish all those nooks that “the other fel¬ 
low” has left untried because they seemed too 
hard. Every brushy stream has many well-de¬ 
fined stopping places, like the stations on a rail¬ 
way, at which the ordinary ■ fisherman halts, 
neglecting the less promising water that lies be¬ 
tween. Not so our angler. He knows that in 
a much fished brook these neglected corners 
often shelter the best fish. Again and again he 
has to stand thigh deep in rushing water, bal¬ 
anced on slippery cobbles, and cast up a lane 
not six feet wide between the encroaching 
alders. Or a dozen futile attempts and perhaps 
a lost tail fly may be necessary to reach that 
pocket beneath the opposite bank so well 
guarded by the low drooping limbs of a yellow 
birch. But when at last the fly drops on just 
the right swirl of the current, the expected rise 
almost always follows. Nobody has had the 
patience to persist in just that way before, and so 
some good trout has lain safely there for weeks. 
When the angler approaches the larger pools 
he is in no hurry to reach the best water at 
once. He drops his flies first on the shallows 
where the water glides from the pool into the 
rapids below, then about the nearer edges. 
Often he picks out a good fish by this method, 
often it fails, but at any rate he always tries 
it. Thus gradually lengthening his casts he 
reaches the center of the pool, where the big 
fellows usually lie, and last of all the foaming 
chute by which the water rushes in from above. 
And so ever thoroughly, ever leisurely he pushes 
up the brook. Where the brush is especially 
thick and the breeze cannot penetrate, the mos¬ 
quitoes and no-see-’ems assail him savagely. He 
produces a small bottle of fly dope and rubs it 
well into his neck and face to repel the attacks 
of these pests—the inevitable thorn on the June 
angler’s rose—until he reaches a breezier spot. 
The sun grows hot overhead and suddenly the 
angler remembers his lunch. Great Scott! It 
is half-past one! Instantly a vast hunger seizes 
him. It is surprising how long one can fish 
without realizing the flight of time or even the 
growth of a healthy appetite. A pebbly bar 
offers a resting place suited to the occasion. 
The angler lays aside rod and creel and collects 
a few pieces of dry driftwood, for what is lunch 
without a hot cup of coffee? While the water 
is boiling in the little quart pail which he car¬ 
ries for the purpose, he improvises a comfort¬ 
able seat with some pieces of plank lodged in 
the alders by the spring freshets. In twenty 
minutes the coffee is ready. Is anything so good 
as a stinging hot cup of coffee after one has 
been wading for hours in a cold stream? Noth¬ 
ing, unless it be the post-prandjal pipe. As he 
enjoys this, the angler takes account of his 
catch. Nearly a score of nice .fish lie side by 
side on the pebbles. He dresses them at leisure, 
packs them aw'ay in the creel on a bed of ferns, 
and resumes his way up the brook. 
Just above the lunching spot a pool appears 
across the center of which a small poplar has 
fallen, making a nasty snag as the swift cur¬ 
rent sweeps under it. A cast below the impedi¬ 
ment brings a fair sized fish. But he knows 
that most of the inhabitants of the pool are 
lying beneath the snag with their heads pointed 
upstream. Carefully he wades across in order 
to cast above the snag. Splash! A big fellow 
is fast this time, but the cast was a bit too far 
out and he has the dropper. We must get him 
out of that in a hurry or—^—yes, the tail fly 
has found the snag and the trout on the dropper 
is acting like a dancer on a tight rope. No help 
for it. Into the pool the angler rushes and by 
the grace of the red gods nets the trout and 
saves him against hope. The other fish in the 
pool have received a scare that will last them 
an hour, but this one is worth it—a good four¬ 
teen inches. 
Around the next bend the roar of the dam 
can be heard. The pool by the mill yields a 
good fish or two, and the angler considers 
whether to walk around the pond to ' the 
meadows above. It is only 4 o’clock and he 
has fished less than a mile of the brook. But 
the creel is heavy with more than twenty nice 
trout—enough to satisfy his modest craving— 
and the angler feels that he has had ample 
sport for this, the first day of his season with 
his old friend. The upper meadows are re¬ 
served for another day. He unjoints his rod, 
repacks the trout and tramps homeward in such 
content as old Izaak felt on many an evening 
of the long ago. A. L. W. 
Anglers’ Club of New York. 
Members of this club have arranged a plan 
for informal weekly meetings, in order that 
they may gather together frequently. Those 
who find it convenient to do so meet and take 
lunch together at 45 Liberty street every Wed¬ 
nesday at 12:3o o’clock p. m. So far several 
of these luncheon-meetings have been held, and 
on each occasion a satisfactory number of mem¬ 
bers have attended. It is intended to make this 
a weekly event, at least during the summer, in 
order that committee members, in preparing for 
the national tournament to be held in Van 
Cortlandt Park in August, can meet to discuss 
plans and other details relating to the big affair. 
Information as to fishing matters is also dis¬ 
seminated at these luncheons, and trips are 
planned and discussed. Until the club acquires 
a home of its own, some arrangement of this 
sort is likely to prove satisfactory. At present 
the roll of members is near the century mark, 
and as more anglers are joining every month, 
this plan is regarded as advisable in order that 
the newer members may become acquainted with 
the others. 
An Uncharted Lake. 
There were three of us—the Medical Doctor, 
the French-Canadian habitant, and the Doctor 
of Philosophy, who tells the tale. For several 
days we had been camping by the shores of a 
moss-ringed trout-abounding lakelet on a lum¬ 
ber trail that disappeared about ten miles fur¬ 
ther on in the virgin Laurentian wilderness. 
We had had enough of the lakelet, its big 
trout and its weird, morass-like shores. 
Rumor had reached us, before we left the 
little settlement eight miles below, that a few 
miles beyond us and a little distance off the 
trail, there lay a beautiful, clear, sandy-beached 
lake. Virgin, and undisturbed even by the 
sound of the lumberman’s ax, it slept within a 
crescent ring of rocky Laurentian hills. I 
knew in a vague and general fashion where it 
lay, but between our camp and the lake stood 
the bare frowning ramparts of a rocky escarp¬ 
ment that rose abruptly for a thousand feet to 
the right of the trail on which we were en¬ 
camped. We had been up this trail for several 
miles, but all the way the rock looked hostile 
and unscalable. 
When we resolved to bring our excursion 
into the wilderness lakeland to a close by an 
effort to find fish in this lake of rumor, bright 
and alluring, we decided to make a slight 
detour and attack the southern face of the 
mountain, where the forest-clad slopes seemed 
to offer a hope of our being able to scale it. 
And, setting out on a clear September morn¬ 
ing, scale it we did, although part of the ascent 
was goat’s work, and many times we had to 
pitch rods up through crevices in the rock and 
address all fours to the task of pulling them 
up. When near the top of the ridge I climbed 
a leaning birch tree to get an outlook and see 
how the land and water lay. 
Far away to south and east stretched the 
dark, illimitable forest, still and silent, save 
where here and there a bevy of wild ducks 
were flying, or a loon violated the solitudes 
with its maniacal laughter. The eastern, and 
in part, the southern horizon, were bounded by 
range upon range of hills, some jagged, bold 
and irregular; others rounded and gently 
sloping. The interspaces of rolling forest were 
broken only here and there by a gleaming lake- 
let, or by the dark lane between pines, spruces 
and maples that marked the course of a stream 
carrying the waters of a hundred lakelets 
southward toward the St. Lawrence. In silent 
dignity of dark forest and gleaming lake, with¬ 
out the faintest sign of man’s works or cares, 
the landscape lay unrolled in its own divine 
right, full of majesty and peace. There was 
nothing to mar one's sense of being a living 
part of a world sublime in its lonely peace, its 
aimless freedom, its carefree yet abounding 
vitality. One felt one’s self in complete com¬ 
munion with the spirit of the landscape. And 
there entered no thought to mar the perfection 
of this experience, except the suggestion that 
perhaps ere long the insatiable maws of pulp 
mill and furniture factory might take toll of 
these solitudes that were now as free from any 
hint of human utility and workmanship, as free 
from any hint of the ways of commerce and 
industry and the struggles of men in the 
world’s marts, as if it were indeed creation’s 
first morning. 
